by Faith Hunter
“You know there’s an IHOP on Highland Boulevard, don’t you?” he said.
I sat up in my seat. “Nope. But I can always eat.”
“So I noticed. International House of Pancakes coming up.”
• • •
Bellies so full it hurt to move, we were back at the B and B as the sky grew noticeably gray. We opened the door, and my pocket buzzed, the number unfamiliar. I picked up. “Yellowrock.”
“Jane, it’s Bobby.” He was whispering and I smiled, remembering the young Bobby telling me secrets one day as I walked him from the school bus to his group home. I started to reply when he said, “Misha’s gone.”
I checked the time. Too late to be a vamp interview/kidnapping. “Gone where?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “She went out last night to see somebody and she didn’t come back. Charly’s still asleep, but when she wakes up, she’s gonna be scared.”
I could hear Bobby’s own fear, a prickly tension in his voice. “I’ll be right there,” I said.
CHAPTER 9
“You Here to Even the Score, Dog Boy?”
I stroked Bobby’s red hair, holding him gently in the hug he needed. “Who did Misha go to meet, Bobby?”
Without letting me go, he pulled me to the table and picked up a manila envelope. “She left you a letter.”
Which did not sound good at all. I accepted the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. I opened the flap and removed a stack of pages, the back part of it printed tourist-trap stuff about local restaurants and plantation houses and sights to be seen in Natchez Under the Hill. The upper part was what looked like printed legal papers, and the very top sheet was a single handwritten letter, signed by Misha.
Hey, girl.
I should be back by morning, but if you are here and have this letter, then things didn’t go like I planned. I have a meeting with a human named Wynonna, a primo blood-servant of a vampire named Charles Scarletti. I am hoping that Wynonna will take me to meet her boss. Wynonna has agreed to be interviewed for the book, and I had to go quickly or risk her changing her mind. If I’m not back by sunrise, and if I don’t answer my cell, would you look after Charly for a few days? And if I’m not back in a couple of days, well, that means the shit hit the fan. (I know, right? Our housemothers would beat us black and blue for cussing.) So anyway, if I’m not back, will you find Charly’s biological father and see that she gets to him? I haven’t seen Randy in years, and, frankly, he doesn’t even know about Charly, but he’s a good guy and my estate and insurance will pay for her continued treatment. Just in case, there are two thousand dollars in this envelope to cover expenses, and the numbers to access my checking account and savings.
Everything you need is in this folder.
And yeah, I know how awful this is of me, but if I don’t come back, I want to make sure Charly doesn’t end up in the system, and I know you will help her. Strange, isn’t it? Of all the people I’d leave my baby with, the one I chose first is the most violent person I know. But also the most honest, ethical, and—in your own way—the most loving. I know we weren’t friends. But I always felt safer with you there. Still do, I guess.
I’d end with “Hugs,” but I know how you feel about them.
Mish
P.S. FYI: Bobby is a sort of a dowsing rod. He gets a salary for it and everything.
“Son of a . . .” The swearwords disappeared into a whisper. I stood holding the letter, my mind full of the white noise of shock. Beast pressed down on my brain with her claws and I took a fast breath, shocked by the pain, but it started me thinking like a security expert again. I opened my phone and checked the time. Misha was way overdue from an appointment with a vamp’s dinner. And that vamp was on my kill list.
I’d been trained as a security expert when I was fresh out of high school, before I started staking rogue vamps for cash. I knew about keeping calm and imposing order on unmanageable situations, but the current situation didn’t feel like an emergency, not with The Princess and the Frog soundtrack playing.
I walked to the TV, where Bobby and Charly were curled up again, Charly under blankets and cuddled up in pillows. Muting and pausing the film, I said, “Bobby, Charly, I need you to think. Did your mommy say where she was going for her meeting?”
“Noooo,” Charly said. “She said you would ask, and she said to tell you that everything you need is in the packet.” Bobby shook his head, agreeing that Misha had said nothing to them.
None of this made any sense. Why leave me a letter telling me what to do if she died? Because that was surely what she had left me. No mother in her right mind would go off and leave her sick child with a mentally challenged man and a crazy biker chick/vampire hunter. Which made Misha mentally unbalanced or with a hidden agenda or in deep trouble. I was betting on a combo, starting with Misha looking for vamp blood to heal her daughter.
I texted the names Wynonna and Charles Scarletti to the Kid with orders to research STAT, then I reread the letter and dumped the packet out on the table. The first thing I saw was the legal paper Misha had drafted and signed to allow me the right to see her book before it was finished. The second thing was a last will and testament. “Crap in a bucket,” I said under my breath. “Crap, crap, crap, crap.”
I realized that they had heard me when Charly giggled and Bobby shook his head. “You still say that, even after you got in trouble for it.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling embarrassed for no good reason. Crap was not a bad word. It was the shortened name of the marketing genius of the best known flush toilet, John Crapper. Really. It was. But not everyone saw it that way, including a short-term housemother when I was growing up. She hadn’t been with us long enough to make any major changes in our lives, but she had put the kibosh on any “bad words,” including crap. Thanks to my mouth and fighting, I’d practically lived in house detention, with toilet duty—crapper duty—for the three months she lived with us. She was one housemother I had been glad to see go.
I dialed Misha’s cell number and was shunted directly to voice mail. I left a short message and closed my phone. The kids were watching me. Okay, Bobby wasn’t a child, but still. What was I supposed to do? How long was I supposed to wait before assuming that Mish was in trouble and track down Randy, Charly’s bio dad? I looked at the time again and said, “Charly, does your mom have a laptop?”
“My mama has everything,” she said, rolling her eyes. She pointed to a satchel near the neatly aligned running shoes, and I pulled it out and booted it up. While it was working, I called my personal, five-star hacker. He answered, and I asked, “We have a missing mother. Misha had a meeting with Charles Scarletti. He’s on our kill list. Is there a way for me to send you every file off a laptop so you can get started working on it?”
“Yeah, sure. What kind of laptop?” I gave him the name and model of the laptop, and he asked, “Can you get online with it? If you can get online, you can e-mail me everything or just anything that looks interesting. It’ll take a while either way.”
I checked the laptop and said, “Yes. And . . .” I clicked through to discover that no files were password protected, and her e-mail passwords were remembered by her system. “I see several things in her most recent files. I’ll zip them up and send them to you.”
“Good. And bring the laptop and anything else electronic when you come. And don’t think I’ll be doing babysitting duty. Not gonna happen.” He disconnected. Crap. That was exactly what I’d been thinking.
• • •
I ordered breakfast on Misha’s room service and while we waited for it to arrive, I asked more questions and called Eli to fill him in on the situation. When he asked what I intended to do with Bobby and Charly, I said, “I’m bringing them back to the house.”
“Jameson is gonna poison your piglet.”
“Yeah. I know.” I raised the volume on the TV and walked away before I went on. “I can’t leave them alone here. My alternative is to call in social services, or whatever they c
all them in Mississippi. I have a signed piece of paper that says Charly is in my care with permission of her legal guardian. And I think Bobby is emancipated, or as emancipated as he can get. He tells me his grandmother passed on last year and he’s been working for Misha since then, though he isn’t real clear in what capacity. Misha hired him as a dowsing rod. That make any sense to you?”
“Not a lick,” Eli said. “I’ll be out front of the hotel in fifteen. We can load your bike up in back.”
“Yeah. Okay.” I hung up and started gathering clothes and toiletries for my new charges, my brain feeling like it was stuffed with steel wool, all snarled and useless. Beast was clearheaded and happy. She had a kit to mother. Sometimes my life made no sense at all.
• • •
Back at Esmee’s, I looked over at my new charges sitting at the breakfast-room table, eating leftover piglet sandwiches. “Bobby? Can you take care of Charly while we’re gone?”
“I’m her babysitter. I always take care of her,” he said.
“Ah. Good.” One problem solved.
“She takes her nap at three,” he said, “and she gets her next medicine at five.”
Charly looked up at me from the plush chair, with a foam-backed blanket over her legs and snugged to her armpits. Her hair was dull and lifeless, and Beast peeked out from my eyes, seeing the sick child. At her feet, Bobby turned on the TV, starting Beauty and the Beast, which seemed oddly apropos. Charly pulled the blanket higher, up under her chin. “Are you really my mama’s friend?”
I felt itchy under her stare. Thinking about Misha. And the friends we might have been had I ever had the slightest notion of how to make one.
“Uhhh. Yes. Yes, I am,” I halfway lied.
“Are you gonna find my mama and bring her back?”
Beast slammed down on my mind, her claws shooting through me with an instant headache. “Yes,” Beast answered, my voice low and gravelly. “Will find her.”
• • •
“You do know how stupid that promise was,” Eli said to me later as I sat at the breakfast-room table with the cell phone in my hand, staring at the blue screen. Papers and laptops and e-tablets and phones were scattered across the table top, along with coffee cups and mugs and small plates and scraps of food.
Before he left and went back to Jackson, where he lived and worked, Gordon had suggested that we might be more comfortable in the larger dining room, but the breakfast room was closer to the kitchen, the coffeemaker, the teapots, and the food. All pluses.
I closed the phone with a snap. Since we got back with Bobby and Charly (and Esmee had gone bonkers over Charly, putting her in the princess room, and Bobby across the hall from her, and all that rigmarole), Alex had been working on locating the blood-servant and vamp Misha had purportedly gone to visit—Wynonna and Charles Scarletti. The Kid had four computers and laptops going at once. It was something to see. I had tried to contact blood-servants in Natchez, to ask about missing humans and vamp properties with basements. I was figuring that Misha had ticked off a vamp and was stuck in with the food supply. Maybe it’s cliché, but basements and vamps have always gone together, maybe because the rooms are underground and keep out the light, or because of the old saying that vamps keep their young chained in the basement for ten years until they cure. But whatever the reason, vamps always seem to have basements. Or safe rooms. Or both. Basements were rare in the Deep South, because of hurricane storm surges and high water tables, so I assumed this had to be fairly easy to narrow down. I had been wrong. The online site for the property-tax division of the Mississippi Department of Revenue wasn’t particularly helpful or user friendly. It was taking time we likely didn’t have.
Nothing was happening. The sun had risen and the sick vamp in the silver cage in the garage was asleep. Leo and Bruiser weren’t taking my calls, and I was loathe to phone my own witch contacts, Molly and Big Evan. I guess killing a family member makes people stop being your friends.
Misha’s book research had now impacted my own investigation. I needed to concentrate on the vamp angle, as in tracking them down and killing them, per my contract with Big H, but now any action I took might conceivably endanger Misha. Big H had said something about magic when I talked to him, so maybe I should call a local witch—but witches didn’t advertise their covens. Whatever was going on in Natchez sounded like a story that a reporter/book writer would jump on in a skinny. But my reporter/book writer was missing. Wouldn’t you know it?
“Did you hear me?” Eli asked, irritation in his voice.
“Yeah, I heard. I kinda figured it was a stupid promise even before I said it. But”—I shrugged—“I said it and I meant it. I’ll find that child’s mother or die trying.” Eli shook his head, an unreadable expression on his face and no telltale change in his pheromones. He was easy to read only when his scent pattern changed, which I hadn’t told him. A girl needs an edge sometimes.
As I sat, phone in hand, it buzzed and rang and Reach’s icon appeared on my screen. Darth Vader’s fanged happy face was silly, but, like earlier, I had a feeling between my shoulder blades that things were going downhill fast. I pressed the SEND button and said, “Reach.”
“Company’s coming,” he said, sounding amused and gleeful and just a bit evil. He hung up. And the doorbell rang.
“I just know I’m gonna hate this, whatever it is,” I mumbled under my breath. I sat there, Eli’s and the Kid’s eyes on me as Jameson moved through the house to the front door. I caught the smell of cat and tightened up all over as Rick LaFleur’s scent blew into the room.
I had known on some level that Rick would show up in Natchez, in person—he was PsyLED’s hand of the law, after all—but it never occurred to me that he would come here, to this house. Stupid me. Worse, I didn’t know if he was here personally because of the case, the gig, and the missing humans, or because he still had feelings for me, or to arrest me for something. I let my mind range back over my kills for the last week. They seemed righteous to me, but . . . maybe not to a cop, with all the rules and regs and courts and all that.
“She’s right this way, sir,” Jameson said. I couldn’t help myself. I swiveled in my chair and looked as he stepped silently into the room. And I caught my breath.
Rick had changed from the pretty boy/bad boy I had met on my first day in New Orleans. He had been dressed then in jeans and Frye boots, looking carefree, a little bit dangerous, and human. A lot had happened between then and now. Now he was dressed in cop casual: charcoal slacks, black shirt, black jacket, and gray tie. He was clean-shaven, and with his Frenchy black eyes and hair, he looked good enough to eat. I smiled when that thought popped into my mind, but the smile slid away when I recognized his expression—closed, hard, unfeeling. I had accused him of trying to kill me when we last met. I sucked at relationships.
Behind him was Soul, one of his partners, a supernat of unknown origins, a tiny thing with silver hair, curves in all the right places, and eyes like the sky at night. She wore her traditional garb of flowing skirts and robe, today made of blue, heavyweight, watered silk in honor of the season. I hadn’t liked Soul the first time I saw her. It had been a stupid, instinctive, competitive reaction. This time, I nodded to her, determined not to be an idiot. Padding behind her was the white werewolf, stuck in wolf form, the neon green grindylow clinging to his back. The grindy looked like a green-dyed kitten, too cute to be dangerous, but her species’ mission in life was to act as a deterrent to the spread of the were taint. If Rick or his wolf tried to pass it along, she would attack and kill them without hesitation.
My eyes flowed back to Rick as Eli stood and shook Rick’s hand, then Soul’s. I stayed in my chair, watching them all, perhaps a little too intently. The wolf growled, and I said to him, “I carry silver shot.” The words were mild, but the growl stopped. The grindy chittered in what sounded like amusement, but I hadn’t learned to translate the language of the species, so what did I know?
Soul moved around the room and held her hand
out to me in a pointed gesture. I met her eyes and slowly stood, taking her hand. She bowed over mine and I hesitated only a moment before bowing back, slightly to the side so I wouldn’t bonk her head coming up. But Beast pushed down on my mind and I followed her unspoken command, letting my bow drop lower than Soul’s. Beast was better at interpreting alpha gestures and relationships than I was. When I rose, I was being regarded with an emotion that was foreign to me—calm and centered and serenely Zen. I felt that calmness flow up my arm and into me. “Jane Yellowrock. We should talk, you and I.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
Soul released my hand, but the calmness stayed with me. I had no idea what her power was, but I liked what I had seen. Until she turned and touched Rick’s arm. The touch was almost intimate, and the calm she had lent to me cracked like a hot stone dropped into icy water. Deep inside, Beast hissed, and my eyes flared with gold. I dropped my lids fast. I had no idea what my face suddenly showed, but I knew I couldn’t stay in the room with all the people. My cat was too angry; I might hurt someone. Most likely me. I whirled on one toe and left the room.
In the mudroom, I slid into my boots and went out back into the cold. Bobby and Charly were in the yard, tossing a ball back and forth, Charly sitting on the bench, Bobby doing all the running. I hadn’t bothered with a coat, and the cold bit through my clothing with spiked teeth. I’d been living on catnaps and stress for several days now, and when I shivered, I told myself that cold and stress were the cause, not the look in Rick’s eyes or the touch between the partners. Not that I believed myself. I was such a liar.
I headed toward the kids, and when he saw me Bobby tossed me the ball. It was high and to the left, but I jumped, caught it, and underhanded it back to him. The ball hit his chest. He tossed it, far more lightly, to Charly. We three played toss the ball for several minutes until Charly visibly tired, at which point Bobby pulled me to the bench, pushed me to sit, and picked up the little girl. With a small smile, he placed her in my lap and sat beside us. The day was clear and chilled and silent, no birds twittering or chirping, no sound of traffic. It was peaceful, and I felt Soul’s calm try to rise up my arm again. I shoved against it, and Beast added her power to the intent; the spell of false calm fled.
